


Our Violent Delights

by ElinorX



Series: The Margaret Coulson Series [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Romeo and Juliet References, Still Daisy but not Johnson
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2016-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-04 11:12:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3065729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElinorX/pseuds/ElinorX
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“These violent delights have violent ends<br/>And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,<br/>Which, as they kiss, consume.”<br/>-	Friar Lawrence | “Romeo & Juliet” by William Shakespeare</p><p>People like to laugh at the literature, but laugh they may, there is a certain truth to those words that for SHIELD Agent "Skye" and Hydra Agent Grant Ward is all too real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Doth With Her Death Bury

**Author's Note:**

> Synopsis: Au in which HYDRA was never truly eradicated post WWII, and SHIELD had known this from the beginning. Throughout the years, HYDRA continued to persist as an independent terrorist organization ruled by their twisted philosophy, and the struggle between the two agencies never ceased. Diverging from the events in TWS, HYDRA launched an external attack on The Triskelion, but the operation failed, and though Nick Fury was “lost” during the process, the damage was not extensive. Under the new leadership of Philip Coulson, SHIELD quickly regained its ground. However, it was during this attack that Shield Agent “Skye” crossed path with Hydra Agent Grant Ward…

  
“These violent delights have violent ends  
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,  
Which, as they kiss, consume.”  
-       _Friar Lawrence | “Romeo & Juliet” by William Shakespeare_

 

**PRESENT**

_DECEMBER 24, 2015_  
_16:45_  
_SHIELD HEADQUARTER: THE NEW TRISKELION_  
_LOCATION: 38.8972° N, 77.0642° W_

 

The first snow of the year falls around the restored edifice like a blanket of frozen feathers. The evening sky is goose-down grey, trimmed at the edge by the violet twilight, and fading into the western horizon of Washington D.C.

Within Unit 103 of the medical bay, a dash of orange light steals through the seam between the shades, and brushes a golden kiss upon the wane, ashen cheek of a slumbering patient. The quietness of Christmas Eve is so pervasive that her companion, a woman well into her forties, believes for the briefest of moment that everything would be alright.

Agent Melinda May, the legendary ‘Cavalry’, trots quietly across the room carrying a small bouquet wrapped in clear plastic. A plain white vase sits upon the bedside table, looking quite sad with its wrinkled daisies and wilting gypsophila. 

_Always the freshest daisies in her room. Always._

The girl’s father had insisted, and who is she to object?

So as she had done for past fortnight, Melinda tosses the dying flowers into the bins and switches them with the fresh batch she’d picked up from the florist an hour ago.

 _One last mission before the holidays, I mean, not that we_ _get holidays. Simmons is probably going to offer to pack me a sandwich again. Fitz is right, she needs to go easy on the mustard._

Her hands – deft, able hands of a senior operative – tremble upon the petals of a particular daisy flower, browning around edge and dying before its time while all its sisters still blossom.

Her mother once told her about an old Chinese tale of a sickly girl burying fallen petals and weeping over their loss. How ridiculous, she had thought back then, but now there are tears springing to her own eyes, and she cannot help it as they escape past her lashes.

Standing over the pot of daisies, May allows herself a minute to cry, where no one can see or hear her. Her shoulders does not quake, and her spine remains straight, but the tears that no one need know about rains down onto the plume. She can see now why the sharp end of a young life would justify sorrow, but while the girl in the story had cried out of self-pity, May’s tears are for someone else.

Wiping her face quickly, she takes a breath to compose herself. Usually, this is the part where she takes leave, but today, she makes a commitment to stay. It’s Christmas Eve; who better to keep company with a comatose than a taciturn recluse?

Gently, May perches herself on the edge of the bed, but keeps her hands balled up in her lap. She wants to reach out and hold the young woman, to touch that face in which she can still see the smiling child, or to be gazed upon by those warm angel eyes, all bright and mischievous, before they’ve ever laid sight on death and destruction.

But she can’t, not when these extra appendages of wires, tubes and IV lines are breathing, feeding, living for the girl. 

May looks down at her busted knuckles and hates herself a little more. She should’ve ended Ian Quain on the spot instead of letting those junior agents pry her off him. She had never liked the title “The Cavalry”, never worn her alias with much pride unlike Stark, Barton (or to an extent, Romanoff). Yet, for once she wishes she had allowed herself the pleasure of letting loose the anger she kept barricaded behind a proverbial stone wall, reigned in all these years after Bahrain.

In her line of work, you learn quickly to make sacrifices and to expect loss. No truer words had been spoken than the ones Nick Fury told The Council: wars are won by soldiers, not sentiment.

But this… she had never wanted this.

The beep of the security scanner and the door sliding open alert her to the arrival of another visitor.

Philip Coulson, director of S.H.I.E.L.D, stands in the door way in his suit and tie.  There are crows feet deeper than there should be wrinkling at the corner of his eyes, but the laugh lines around his lips that she always assumed a man with such infectious smiles ought to gain with age are not quite so prominent.

Still, he looks well; the years have been kind to Coulson. Some men are like fine wine…

“Agent May,” Coulson greets, and adds after a pause. “Melinda.”  

“Hello Phil.”

May doesn’t bother standing up. In this room, in front of _her,_ some pretenses are simply unnecessary. ‘Er, his first name is Agent’ – Tony Stark hadn’t been entirely wrong with that off-handed joke. They _have_ let their professional life dominate their existence for far too long, but tonight…tonight they are who they should have been, not Director Coulson or Agent May, just the roles they’ve both neglected for the sake of duty to the greater good.

Coulson carries a small metallic box in his hands, which he begins to fiddle nervously when May’s gaze inevitably lands on it.

“Audrey found it in the attic, and I thought – well…” Melinda watches Phil approaching the bed where the young agent lies, placing the music box on the opposite night stand. He opens it, and the tiny golden gears begins to turn and play a pretty little song.

Casting a narrow-eyed glare full of reproach and something bitter towards the tinkling orchestrion, May bites down on her tongue. Fond and warm recollections of the days past in contrast with the bleak present does nothing for her but invoke a sour nausea that she finds nearly impossible to bear.

“She can’t hear it.” 

“She can,” Phil insists, but he knows it's a lie.

He had found the prognosis report this morning lying on his desk. The language was detached, empirical, and completely unbashful to the truth, exactly as how protocol commands. Agent Skye’s conditions are beyond the scope of human medicine and are deteriorating daily. At best, she would remain in PVS, but the trajectory of her cerebral activity offers little hope towards that end. It is the joint estimate of SHIELD physicians and the biochemistry department that within the month she would be declared brain dead.

Phil had sat for good long hour in silence with that report in front of him, hands clasped shut before his chin. He imagines that the doctors on the other end are simply doing their job, and cannot have possibly known how the contents of a standard statement can topple his whole world.

_Agent Skye. Field operative. Hacker. Former Rising Tide activist. Just Skye._

Free and undefined.

Just Skye…well, at least to everyone Level 7 and below. SHIELD keeps a thorough personnel database and conducts extensive background checks on all its employees (you never know who could be Hydra these days). Given names, nicknames, family names, skills, affiliations, education, and intimate history – everyone has a file, even legends like Bucky Barnes and Black Widow, even ‘Just Skye’. Those who play the espionage game know it’s hard to bury the past, especially when the past is in your veins (and sitting behind a desk on the 32nd floor signing your pay cheque).  

Jemma Simmons and Leo Fitz think Skye’s file name is Mary Sue Poots, which is actually a silly joke that everyone takes for granted.

Ha… if only they know.

Shadows fall across the silence between The Cavalry and the Director, but in the darkness, May raises her gaze to meet Coulson’s, and her eyes were bright like fire, like the stars that burn for millenniums. Coulson knows, that despite her cool countenance, there is a heat, _a passion,_ inside Agent May which fuels her on.

Now, those eyes are on him, their depth filled with anger, hurt, and questions unanswered. Her hands tremble in her lap, and she feels foolish, naïve, like a girl once again, because of course it would be Phillip Coulson who’d be the one to make her feel ever ridiculous. Her own S.O. once said out of frustration that her partner brought the worst and best out of her.

“Were you ever planning to tell me?” She demands coarsely, voice hardened.

The man starts to object, but he knows he’d been made when she draws a microchip from her pocket. A hole had been punched through the chip, rendering it practically useless, and a thin metal chain is looped through the center.

It was found on Skye’s person, which the medical team turned in with the rest of her personal effects. Coulson had entrusted the microchip to Leo Fitz, one of the brightest engineers and youngest in SHIELD, but how Melinda wound up with it…well, he supposes he really ought not to be that surprised.

Melinda May is not The Cavalry for nothing.

“A Hydra Agent,” she reaches out and smoothes back a lock of hair from Skye’s brow. “You knew, and you kept it from me.”

Coulson looks away from the woman’s accusing glare and says nothing in defense. He knows from vivid experience the heartache of being shut out by someone you care about, but even so, he finds no satisfaction from seeing Melinda on the verge of tears, trembling with rage and disbelief. The truth is he hadn’t known, at least not until it was too late, and he only thought to spare his dearest friend the pain of something which is already beyond the ability of either of them to repair.

Now, he can do no more than apologize.

“I’m sorry.”

Melinda shakes her head and shuts her eyes as if she’s simply too tired to look on. Her shoulders sag, and she relents.

“No, Phil. This is my fault. I should’ve protected her.”

His fists clench in his pockets so tightly they draw blood from his palm. How he wants to just make everything alright again! He can tell, by the heavy violet bruises she sports under her eyes that she hasn’t slept in days. Her brows pinch together ever so often, a tick which means her head must be pounding. She always gets like that when her blood sugar is low. When was the last time she ate?

Coulson remembers his friend in such a state only once before, and he hadn’t been able to help her then either. After Bahrain, it was if she fell into the ashes and let it suck her into the quicksand, deeper and deeper into an abyss where he could not follow.

“I’m going to The Cube.”

He doesn’t realize she’s stood up until her voice jostles him out of his thoughts. May winds her scarf around her neck and zips up her SHIELD winter jacket.

 “Mel –“

“It’s Christmas Eve. You have places to be. I do not.” The woman stands before him with her chin jutted, her jaws clutched, and her will unrelenting. Let it never be said that Phil Coulson is one to cower from a battle. He’s been to the other side, has had death swallow him whole only to spit him back out. When a man has gone through what he has gone through, there is truthfully very little in this world that he would still fear. Nevertheless, any smart man would know to be afraid when Melinda May has mutiny in her eyes and murder on her mind, and Phil is a very smart man.   

“Anyway,” She continues. “I need to know.”

A smart man would also know to walk away. He walked away once…

 “Let me come with you.”

_Not so smart then after all._

May contemplates his offer with a slight tilt of her head and a frown. Coulson isn’t sure if her reluctance is born out of mistrust or something else, but he doesn’t like it. He had never been a fan of doubt, especially not of hers directed towards him. They may not be as close as they once were, but he’d like to think that at least this time she can overlook the burnt bridges.

“You are the Director. When I go in there, I won’t promise I will control what I do. I can’t put you in that position. There are rules –“

“ _Fuck_ the rules –“ His sharp outburst startles both of them. May’s eyes widen fractionally, and Coulson feels silly for thinking her earlier hesitation is for any reason other than selfless consideration for _him_. This is Mel. Strong, kind, untouchable Mel.

“Phil…” Her hand reaches for him, but she catches herself in time, fingers curling in. The scabs on her knuckles, which she had busted open while punching in Ian Quain’s face, stretch uncomfortably as her fist tightens. When she feels his gaze fall from her face down to her hands, May slides them into her pockets.

“You shouldn’t come.” 

Casting a glance behind his shoulder at the young agent lying in a comatose state, Coulson replies, “HYDRA is going to pay for what they did. I’m going.”

 

* * *

 

 _SAME DAY_  
_20:05_  
_SHIELD BASE: THE CUBE_  
_LOCATION: CLASSIFIED_  


_Once, they were in Pula, Croatia. He’d stolen an important piece of intel in Prague, and she’d been on his tail for two days. But he wasn’t really running, and she wasn’t really chasing._

_There had been tangled sheets, a bottle of 2007 Sassicaia, and the endless blue of the Adriatic Sea._

_He had emerged from the shower to see her basking in a patch of sunlight on the balcony, with a smile and the wind in her hair. Dear god, he had thought, she’s just a kid. Barely a day older than twenty three._

_“Why do you have to be Hydra, Grant?” She wondered out loud, without regard of whom might hear her._

_His hands grasped the railing on either side of her, enclosing her in the circle of his arms. He rested his cheek on the crown of her hair and sighed, “Why do you have to be SHIELD?”_

_Skye didn’t make the argument that Hydra was a terrorist organization hell-bent on death and destruction to everything S.H.I.E.L.D swore to defend. The distinction would’ve been blurred at best. She was a hacker once, as she had told him the first time they crossed the line, and she didn’t do hypocrisy._

_Chuckling, she leaned back against his chest._

_“If only you knew, Grant Ward. If only you knew.”_

_He kissed her bare shoulder but didn’t press about it._

_Grant Ward._

_Agent Ward._

Grant Ward.

“Grant Ward.”

Mossy green eyes snap open, only to squeeze shut against the starch white fluorescent light. He lies there with the heel of his palm pressed into his eye sockets, waiting for the pain behind his eyelids to fade. Slowly, he becomes aware of the thinly matted bench underneath his back and the taste of filtered prison air on his tongue.

He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, or to dream about….or to dream.

 _Son, you’re growing soft._ Garret would say.  

“Grant Ward, you’ve got visitors.”

He recognizes the agent standing on the other side of his invisible jail wall. ‘Mockingbird’, they call her – Agent 19: Barbara Morse, Level 8. Not an Avenger, but close.

She has a face that could easily be criticized as intense, hard, mean, but Grant knows that it’s just the one she wants him to see. How many HYDRA agents had unwittingly talked themselves into giving up everything they know inside her interrogation room?

Too many.

Not him though. He hasn’t cracked yet. What is it that the Miranda rule decrees? The right to an attorney, the right to remain silent. While an attorney might be somewhat of a stretch, Grant is completely within his ability to refuse co-operation. This is SHIELD, full of people who actually believe in goodness, so for the time being he doesn’t have to worry about bodily suffering quite as much as he would if the roles had been reversed between him and Skye.

Grant holds back a shudder at the idea.

In the end, she is right.

Either SHIELD will get to him, or Hydra will get to her.  In fact, the former is the very best of all the possible scenarios they played out in their minds, the latter the worst, and the most probable being they both die. So his circumstance, as hopeless as one might think, is actually incredibly comforting.

When Agent 13 and 33 shoved him to the floor and cuffed his hands still covered Skye’s blood, the only thought rising above the haze that had taken over was how at least now Whitehall will never get his hands on her.

For both of them, _that_ is a true mercy.

“Hydra Agent or not, I would’ve thought your commanding officer would’ve taught you a lesson in respect, or is that asking too much of your character?” Bobbi’s snappish remark brings his attention to the two newcomers now standing beside her.

They must’ve been speaking to him. He’s gotten good at tuning out these SHIELD people, but when he looks properly at the two “visitors”, his interest peaks.

Ward identifies the man immediately: Director Coulson, Nick Fury’s successor. Every Hydra agent alive knows that face. But the Asian woman…there is something familiar about her he can’t ascertain.

Slowly, Wards rises to his feet and walks towards the thin veil of interlaced lazer grid security barrier that keeps him imprisoned in this cell. Up close, he sees that the woman is quite a few years his senior, beautiful and fierce in a way he recognizes. His gaze lands on the lanyard around her neck and follows it down her front, where he finds her ID.

         Agent Melinda May.

         Administrator/Specialist

         F BRN 5-06

_Good Lord._

The words are out of his mouth before he can stop himself, the first and only thing he has allowed himself to say since he was brought in. The look on Bobbi’s face is nothing short of dumbfounded, but May’s blank canvas of an expression doesn’t flicker.

“You’re The Cavalry.”

She stares at him, and no one else attempts to interrupt her cold contemplation. Funnily, Ward gets the impression that bad things happen to people who call her that. (Maybe he overreached when he assumed SHIELD was beyond good ol’ fashioned torture).

 “I can be,” she replies eventually. May is calm, one would even say courteous, but the steel in those dark, bottomless eyes makes it perfectly clear to Ward that she would like nothing more than to kill him with her bare hands.

That is, if she beats Philip Coulson to it. The man hasn’t said a word since he came in, and he doesn’t need to. His hostility is rolling off him in tidal waves.

The Director of SHIELD and “The Cavalry”.  

_Damn son, that’s some serious SHIELD top brass._

Skye was – _is –_ no simple foot soldier, and while Ward can understand that perhaps having a…an… _affair…_ with the enemy probably caused a security panic that pissed off more than couple of her bosses, a Level 5 agent still does not warrant an entourage like this. That just _doesn’t_ happen.  

_Unless…unless -_

Wait.

Staring at the pair in front of him, Ward is awash with a strange sense of clarity, as if after weeks of being locked inside this cinderblock, someone suddenly lets in a stream of proper light. 

Finally, something makes sense.

_-_

_“If you only knew, Grant. If you only knew.”_

_-_

 “So that’s it. That’s what she meant.”

He’s been so good at avoiding thinking about where Skye had been during the time he spent in this cell. He had just about convinced himself that the medic team patched her up and sent her to her commanding officer to be yelled at and put on desk-duty until further notice.

The biochemist - Dr. Simmons - came to see him three days ago. How she managed to sneak around the bureaucracy, he doesn’t know, but she stood there almost on the exact spot May is standing on now, just wringing her hands and staring at him with a pinched frown as he did his morning push-ups.

Whatever message she came to deliver, she never worked up the courage to say it. Nevertheless, he toyed with the idea for days after she’d gone that it was Skye who sent her ….

But it seems there is no point in playing pretend. Dr. Simmons had been the obituary he didn’t want to read.  

“No. Oh God, please no.” Ward stumbles a couple of steps backwards. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” His fist slams into the wall, and an explosion of orange web-lines burst from the point of impact, sending a jolt of electrical impulse up his arm, straight into his torso and down his legs. He crumbles to a heap on the floor, muscles twitching in awful spasms, still screaming, “Skye, not her. Please…” 

On the other side, Melinda grinds out, “That’s not her name.”

-

“ _Tell me something true, Grant.”  Skye was curled against his side, her head cushioned against his chest, and her soft naked body providing a steady source of warmth in this drafty little cottage, forty-five kilometers west of Moscow._

 _His mind was idle, and he was perfectly content to relish the flood of endorphins and oxytocin overriding his system._ I love you, _he wanted to say, except the truth terrified him to the point where he couldn’t talk about it, and he doubted that she would believe him even if he it. Instead, he drew the blanket around her bare shoulders and said, “You first.”_

_“Alright.” Skye propped herself onto her elbows. “My earliest memory is the view of the horizon from the cockpit of a plane. My mother,” she stared down at her hands, “was a pilot.”_

_“Is that why your name is Skye?” Grant inquired softly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear._

_She kissed him in reply – please, please don’t ask any more – and lays back down. “Yes. Yes it is.”_

_-_

Philip Coulson crouches down beside him and says with no room left in his tone for anything other than total complacency. He does, for a split second, remind Ward of John Garett.

“Tell us what happened to our daughter.”

 


	2. Move Me To Stand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The narrative jumps around in the timeline. I hope it isn't too confusing to follow (and holy hell i misquoted Shakespeare. the mistake has been corrected)

  
“To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand.   
Therefore if thou moved, thou runn'st away.

A dog of that house shall move me to stand. I will  
Take the wall of any man or maid of Montague's”  
\-       _Gregory & Sampson _|  _Act I Scene I, "Romeo & Juliet"_ 

 

**16 MONTHS AGO**

_AUGUST 28, 2014_  
_13:15 EST_  
_PLACE DES ARTS, MONTREAL_

A conversation between them occurs in Montreal. This isn't the first time they've met after their initial encounter during the Triskelion incident. The impossible girl who lived now has a name – Skye – even if she still refuses to call him anything other than 'Hydra Puppet'.

They are sitting outside Place Des Arts watching the crowd attending the Montreal World Film Festival. She wears a red summer dress and drinks her overly priced Frappuccino.

"So what happened that day? Afterwards."

"After what?" She asks absently, eyes watching the crowd. It is a rare occasion; they are at the same location for separate reasons. He is here to kill someone, and she is here to kill someone else. Not that it matters. They've got an unspoken agreement established: be it friendly banter or flirty suggestions, nothing would change if they ever find themselves at the wrong end of each other's guns.

When they are on the clock, nothing can ever change.

Skye rescinds her scrutiny directed at a suspicious looking man who as it turns out is just trying to hide the joint in his suit pocket. "Oh you mean –"

"Yeah."

* * *

 

**19 MONTHS AGO**

_APRIL 13, 2014_  
_09:43 EST_  
_SHIELD HEADQUARTER: THE (OLD) TRISKELION_  
_LOCATION: 38.8972° N, 77.0642° W_

When Steve Roger's voice breaks through the intercom, everyone in the Triskelion stops to listen.

Sharon Carter will tell you that she has a gun pointed between Brock Rumlow's eyebrows before the Captain even finishes speaking.

Melinda May will tell you that the pencil pushers in Admin has just about shit themselves at the revelation. Jemma Simmons and Leo Fitz wish they could vouch more for their fellow scientists, but alas neither are very good liars.

Victoria Hand will tell you that as soon as the news reaches her, she sends her command base The Hub into total paralysis. By her orders, no Hydra agent is going to penetrate or escape from her walls.

Nick Fury – er, if he were to live, God rest his one-eyed soul – will tell you how putting a bullet through Alexander Pierce's face gives him every satisfaction and yet no satisfaction at all. Never in the near-seventy years since SHIELD was born had anything come this close to annihilating them. How could so many of them be so blind to the undercurrents flowing beneath their feet? His disappointment and fear are both equally justified.

_Project Insight has been compromised._

_HYRDA assassinated Director Fury._

_Alexander Pierce sold out everyone._

Maria Hill will tell you that the sight of the proto-type new-generation helicarriers rising into the sky, bearing the coordinates that will topple the free world as they know it (though how "free" it actually is still requires debate), renders her completely numb.

Clint Barton, well, he will tell you nothing at all, having been deep undercover in a remote region of South America during the whole attack. He emerges a week later to find his organization alive but in shambles, concerned and confused as hell. (Natasha is not impressed).

And Phil Coulson? Three thousand feet in the air over the arctic circle on a mission of his own, his mobile command unit is a bit late on the up-take too, but when the reports do reach The Bus, he will tell you how utterly proud he is to be part of SHIELD. Unofficially, he will also tell you how utterly proud he is of his little girl.

Project Insight is supposed to be a good thing, a way to counteract global terrorism at the bud, to prevent catastrophe before it happens. It isn't supposed to be the catastrophe itself.

But Hydra had bought out Alexander Pierce, and Pierce had bought out STRIKE team, and now everything is on fire.

The control chips that Captain America manages to switch into the operating center do not work. Even though the old chips (ones that Alexander had allowed Hydra to tamper with) are removed, they've already installed a virus into the system that prevents any further change of command.

Down on the ground, enemy strike units barricade the exits, waiting for the helicarrier's long range precision weapons to fire. One of the thousands of gun-heads is fixed on the building complex before them, which houses some SHIELD's most valuable human assets.

The plan has become increasingly transparent: grab the best and brightest and blow up the rest. Several elite Hydra extraction teams have been sent in with a shopping list, and the sale is for limited time only. When the clock strikes twelve, the whole place will be reduced to smithereens, ending approximately 7000 thousand lives, three times the population of the SS. Titanic.

It doesn't matter if the extraction isn't completely successful, because as the goes saying goes, 'if I can't have it, no one can'.

When Victoria Hand calls Phil Coulson into The Hub after the incident, she says with a wiry smile, "You've one hell of a kid, Coulson."

Skye, for the most part, remembers slamming her fingers into the keyboard at a speed which she had never done before. As a kid, she had never encountered a firewall she couldn't crack or virus she couldn't beat. Hell, she hacked into the Pentagon when she was fifteen and narrowly escaped juvie because of her parental and grandparental (thank you Nana May) connections.

Skye swears, as she pushes herself to work faster, that if she lives, she  _needs_ to meet the son of a bitch who designed this piece-of-genius. (She does eventually find out about Zola, but that's another story on its own).

"Skye! Hurry!" Maria's urgent beckoning tightens the knot in the girl's stomach, but her hands are already moving at the extreme limit of human capability.

"I'm trying!"

Ever since her graduation from Operations three years ago, Skye had been focusing her efforts in the field, benching her computer savviness in favour of more physical skills. Romanoff says she has a promising career, but Skye knows that at this point in time, she is still just a hammer, and not even a very tough one at that. If she ever wants to be a specialist, she will have to be more than just a blunt instrument. Today however, the skills required of her are not the ones she's been slaving over for months, but the ones that nearly costed her 25 years in a federal facility. Right now, SHIELD has no shortage of people excellent with a gun, but all their prowess would be moot if she can't get the control chips to work.

What's it matter who can shoot a gun, if they're going to be dead in less than two minutes.

An enemy agent breaks through the door just then, probably here to 'collect' Hill, but her bullets takes him down in one go. Over the gunfire and explosion, both inside and out, Skye hardly hears a thing. Not the guns, not Maria's urging, not her heartbeat, not even her own thoughts. It is fair to say she has reached a state of complete disassociation between her body and whatever it is that drives her forward. There is nothing except the furious tapping of her fingers on the keyboard, and the terrible countdown of the flashing red light.

1:00

"Skye!"

"Almost there!"

"WHAT?!" Static buzzes through Maria's earpiece and she spins around, just as an explosion blasts through the midriff of the third building. It hosts mostly non-tactical departments such administration, medical, research and development…

0:30

Even though they are in a completely separate wing, the shock wave rocks the foundation beneath their feet. The jolt hits Skye like a slap to the back of the head, and suddenly, the neural circuits which didn't connect finally sparks the light bulb in her prefrontal cortex.

0:15

"I got it! I got it!"

0:10

0:08

0:06

0:06

The new control chips come online, and the world lets out a large sigh of relief.

Skye jumps out of her chair, practically shoving Maria aside as she presses her face into the window. The north-eastern wing is enshrouded in smoke from the 46th floor up. The entirety of the top one third of the building is in flames.

Fire burns up…

_Simmons! Fitz!_

_Mom._

"We have fifteen minutes before the helicarriers blow. Can you guarantee we're in the safe zone?" asks Maria, taking her by the arm and turning her away from the havoc. "Agent Skye."

"I'm a hacker, Deputy Director, not a physicist. If the helicarrier is going to drop, I can't predict where it will land."

As they speak, three SHIELD quinjets, having broken free from the barricade, shoot through the air. Behind them, the soldiers and agents now fueled by the adrenaline of their near-death experience and the new found confidence from the defeat of the helicarriers, follow suit. One after another, rows and rows of jets rise into the sky.

Maria presses a hand on her mic and commands, "Attention all SHIELD agents. This is Maria Hill. The Triskelion is compromised. We need to evacuate under T-15 minutes. Activate protocol alpha dash oh one hundred zee. I repeat activate protocol alpha dash oh one hundred zee."

"I'm going to the third wing!" says Skye as she straps on her vest and loads her handgun, but her godmother's iron grip seizes by her the shoulder and forces her back down onto the chair.

"Your mother can get herself out, Agent Skye. I will not allow you –"

"Agent Hill, I'm afraid that's not up to you. You just activated protocol alpha – 0100Z. Under states of emergency evacuation, operative agents Level 3 and 4 are responsible for ensuring the safety of non-tactic staff. I'm Level 4."

Despite her valid argument, Maria can not be dissuaded, "Hydra is here to snatch our people, if your father – "

But Skye doesn't want to think about her father, or how if her mother or herself dies, he has a fiancée with whom he can still create a new family.

She likes Audrey, really she does, okay? Audrey is sweet, kind, and non-judgmental, and her dad has every reason to love her, but after New York, Skye thought for sure it was over. There was no way her dad can undo the damage of lying and pretending to be dead, but apparently Audrey is a saint, because now they're engaged.

What happened to her parents, it was such a long time ago. The end of  _them…_ her mother had started it, and her father had finished it. By now, she should be over the whole thing, but Skye has never been good at letting go.

Besides, she is not the first or only legacy to fall into the ranks. Triplet, Sharon, they're all descendants of senior agents, and no one would ever think to stop them from doing their job.

Yanking her arm from Maria's grasp, Skye speeds off without another word.

 

* * *

 

**16 MONTHS AGO**

_AUGUST 28, 2014_  
_13:15 EST_  
_PLACE DES ARTS, MONTREAL_

"Thanks."

Her frappacino is sucked down to mere ice bits, but Skye keeps jabbing at it with her straw. Ward thinks it's cute. She looks so harmless, sitting there in the sun with her casual sunglasses and painted toes. She can easily be mistaken for a student from the university just two blocks away, but she is so much more than that.

"For what?" He asks into his iced coffee.

"For telling me about Jemma and Leo. I found them and got out of the building before the helicarrier collided into it."

"Believe me I was just trying to save my own ass," he chuckles mirthlessly. "About Fitz –"

" _Agent_  Fitz," corrects Skye, the playful attitude she sported earlier fading quickly. Skye doesn't like talking about other people she works with, for security reasons, but also because the more she talks about her real friends, the more she is reminded that the person she is having coffee with is the enemy. He may not be the instigator of the Project Insight catastrophe, but he is part of the reason and therefore carries part of the blame.

 

* * *

 

**19 MONTHS AGO**

_APRIL 13, 2014_  
_09:43 EST_  
_SHIELD HEADQUARTER: THE (OLD) TRISKELION_  
_LOCATION: 38.8972° N, 77.0642° W_

Why Team 3 thinks it would be a good idea to extract assets in a burning building, Ward has no idea, but at this rate, not only is he not going to find Donnie Gills, he might not even make it out alive himself.

Who is the commander of Team 3 again? Oh right. Sitwell. That brainless fucker.

"Commander, sir, should we proceed with our orders? I mean it's getting kind of hot in here," One of his subordinates shouts over the wreckage.

"If you would like to be the one to tell Dr. Whitehall that we don't have Donnie Gills, then by all means go."

The man visibly pales at the reminder, and Ward turns around, levelling, "That's what I thought. The orders were clear for Gills. Either we bring him in, or we leave this place with his body. Now I personally have an objection to becoming barbeque, so if you wouldn't mind shutting that whiny mouth of yours and just do your job."

Speaking into his mic, Ward orders, "Alright, Team 2, this floor is wraps. Let's move on."

Sitwell's detonation ensures no one on levels 46 and above is getting out. That takes care of all of medical and half of administration (or at least those too injured or too slow to run when they had the chance), and enables Hydras to focus their man-power on those in research and development.

Donnie Gills is a newly graduate from the Academy, as green as the first sapling in the spring. Taking him out should be no problem, even if he is a gifted. Hydra has encountered its fair share of special people over the years, and Ward is no stranger to terminating those who refused to co-operate. It does become problematic however, when the bosses want 'live specimens'. Gifted ones are often volatile, and plans of containment will always sound easier on paper than in execution.

Whitehall said he wants Gills's body dead or alive, but that usually means alive. Ward may not exactly be the 'happy to comply' kind, but he's the 'happy to remain alive' kind. No one messes with Whitehall, and Garrett's favouritism only protects him so far.

Leading his team into the lobby of the 43rd floor, Ward scans his surroundings. This level, like the one above it, is entirely comprised of laboratories and expensive research equipments. Due to its close proximity to the blast radius, its structural integrity has been badly compromised. If Donnie is here, he is most likely dead.

"Divide up. Let's do a quick sweep. Report back at the exit in five. Go."

The six men under his command nod and take off in teams of two, leaving him alone. Any staff still able enough to move has long abandoned this floor, and those left behind are too dead to be of any value. Rounding the corner, Ward adjusts his mask and purposely avoids the impaled lab tech as he ventures further down the smoky corridor. The fire here isn't as bad as it had been on higher floors, but it gets worse in rooms straight ahead.

Bending down, he wipes the ashes from a sign that has fallen from the ceiling.

Molecular Biochemistry. Not likely where Donnie Gills is going to be. The boy is a specialist in engineering and chemphyschem.

Ward is in the process of considering turning around when he suddenly hears voices coming from within one of the labs to his left.

Shuffling closer to the entrance, he backs himself against the wall and listens. The smoke is making it harder to breath, so he'll have to do this quick.

"Dr. Simmons, we have to go! The fire is getting stronger. You'll die in here!"

"I can't just leave him! He's my best friend, and it's all my fault…"

There is a collection of grunts and metals scrapping the floor before the woman speaks again, this time more out of breath than earlier. Jesus, the smoke is bad in here. Whatever they kept in this place, it got ignited by the bomb blast.

"Donnie, forget about me. You heard Agent Hill. We have to evacuate. Soak yourself with the emergency shower by the lab entrance and go." The older agents coughs out, forcing some degree of resolve and command into her voice.

_Gotcha Donnie._

Ward crouches down, slowly creeping into the lab, taking cover behind a row of lab benches where he has a clear and constant visual of the target.

Donnie Gills hesitates around his superior officer, attempting to pull her away but with no success. The smoke is becoming nearly unbearable, and the boy's resilience finally caves. As he stands to escape, Ward takes his chance.

Two ICER rounds strike Donnie on his neck and temple. The kid stares at him, shocked, until his eyes roll back and he drops to the floor like a sack of potatoes. From the looks of it, he probably weighs about as much, which makes transporting him out of here significantly less burdensome for Ward and his team.

The woman lets out a shocked yell, whipping around in time to see the webs of violet-blue dendrotoxin sprawling over Donnie's pale skin, ghosting past his hairline, and seeping into his veins.

 _"_ Oh no, Donnie…" She reaches for the boy, but Ward would be damned to let a seasoned biochemist near a 'special' he just tranquilized.

"Don't touch him. Hands up where I can see them."

With a gun pointed at her head (a real one this time), she has very little choice but to obey.

The nametag clipped to her lab-coat reveals her identity:  _JEMMA SIMMONS, PhD. BIOCHEMISTRY._

Her name is on the list too. Not his list though. Sitwell's. Ward's targets consist mainly of those in engineering and tech. Counting Donnie Gills, he's crossed off or collected all of them except for one more. Leopold Fitz, Donnie Gill's SO, is not a gifted like the boy, but nevertheless has an incredible mind. And if Ward were to hazard a guess, he'd say the guy he's looking for is the unfortunate lying beneath this broken storage shelf.

Simmons kneels between him and the engineer, apparently keen to protect her colleague. Her hands shake as she laces them behind her head, but she refuses to look away from the barrel of his gun. She doesn't speak, but her stiff spine and the air she carries make a literal definition of the phrase 'over my dead body.'

"Move aside."

She does not. Admirable, her courage, if it isn't about to get her killed.

"Don't be stupid."

Again, nothing. In fact, Simmons seems to have stopped breathing altogether. Ward doesn't understand how someone can look fierce and fearless with tears streaming down her face. He also doesn't understand what must be going through her head.  _You jump, I jump? He die, I die?_ Nothing good ever comes out of trying to be a martyr. Or a sentimentalist, for that matter…

"I gave you a chance," he warns, finger pressing the trigger. "You SHIELD people just can't take a hint."

_BOOM!_

A loud commotion jostles him. Mistakenly, he turns his head towards the sound, and the scientist takes this as meaning he is no longer paying attention and tries to grab the gun from him. However, since she has neither the necessary skills nor stealth, up against someone like Ward, who even when temporarily distracted is still in tune with his environment, she is completely out of her depth. From his periphery vision, he catches her miniscule change in posture and deduces her objective in less than a quarter of the time it takes for her to rise to her full height.

One hard pistol-whip sends her crashing back down, and she stays there, curled up and petrified by equal parts shock and pain.

_BANG!_

Looks like his subordinates are having some difficulties of their own. Slinging Donnie over his shoulder, Ward glances towards the trapped man under the wreckage.

Fitz's left ulna is protruding from his skin and his legs look positively mangled. That doesn't mean he's necessarily dead – Ward has seen men suffer much worse and live, fascinating how much the human body can endure – but transportation is going to be a hassle especially if they want a quick retreat.

In conclusion: not worth it.

Switching up his handgun for his rifle, Ward makes for the exit.

Up ahead in the elevator lobby, three of his team members are losing to one SHIELD agent, a woman.

"Sir – "A fourth man comes towards him. "Is that –"

"Yes. Take Gills and go down the exit to your left, there should be an extraction team waiting at the designated site."

Ward waits until the remainder of his team and Gills disappear into the staircase before asserting himself into the fight. By then, two of the three agents are already on the floor. Dead.

Lifting his rifle into position, Ward fires his first shot at the back of her head. He doesn't miss, but neither does he hit true. The bullet penetrates through her elastic band, and a plume of chestnut brown locks explodes in the wake of its path.

He should've known then there is going to be nothing but murky waters and blurry lines between the two of them.

She turns, barely looking as she shoots his last subordinate in the groin (purposely, he assumes, no matter how she denies it). Her hair whips freely with the momentum of her torso, and it would have been quite an artistic sight if they weren't trying their very hardest to shoot each other dead.

Neither succeeds. Naturally.

Ward will look back on that day and admit with some perplexity and chagrin that he underperformed. Somewhere along the way of him trying to kill her, he lost his rifle and ended up on his back, staring death in the eye. And what lovely earthy brown eyes, death has.

"If you do that," He interjects just as Skye's finger tightens around the trigger. "Who's going to save those scientists trapped back there?"

"That's a bluff," she pants out, digging the heel of her boot harder into his stomach. She's looking worse for wear, but Ward knows he can't have looked much better.

"Is it? Fine. Call it. Dr. Simmons and Dr. Fitz's lives are on you."

The girl flinches. Ah, so the names mean something to her! Her nostrils flare as she inhales sharply, and her entire countenance is briefly overwhelmed by something more prominent than her desire to end him.

Yet, Ward's carefully timed jib has already shifted the game in his favour. Her hands are no longer as steady, and that wink of hesitation is all he needs to swipe her off her feet. His muscle memory and survival instincts kick in full force at the slightest chance of gaining the upper-hand.

But the girl is agile, determined and unrelenting. Flipping onto her feet, she dodges left, evading the blow aimed to incapacitate her. As his fist skims past her right ear, she twists, locking his forearm between her shoulder and the curve of her elbow. She would've broken his arm, but he retaliates first by jamming into the juncture of her neck, and her whole body goes limp at the impact.

Before she can recover, Ward reaches around and pulls her into a choke hold. Up close, she is a small thing, a meager 5'6 compared to his towering 6'3. She doesn't weight that must either, and as he tightens his grip, he can feel the tip of her boots scrapping urgently against the ground.

He had come so close to killing her then.

Slowly, he watches her young face darken from red to purple, feels the fight leave her limbs, and thinks it'll be over soon….

Until a sharp, drilling sensation shoots up his side.

Growling in pain, Ward drops her immediately, and she rolls away gasping. By the time he yanks the small dagger from between his 8th and 9th rib (a centimeter deeper and it would've punctured his lung), she has recovered her gun and is firing back at him with renewed wrath.

Colliding into the wall, he suddenly remembers the experimental weapon strapped to the side compartment of his trousers. Hydra scientists call it 'the obelisquen', which is a smooth round disk adapted from the traditional Japanese shuriken and infused with the alien properties extracted from a recent 'acquisition'. Field agents have yet to test in real combat, but they are told to be diligent with it.

Ward has seen with his own eyes the test subjects turn into ashes in a matter of seconds. Once struck, death is assured.

Bullets rains down on him mercilessly, and goddamn if this agent isn't a crack shot. Had he been a lesser agent himself, he would be dead five times over. Diving across the hall, he rolls swiftly behind a heavy-duty refrigerator. Its thick metal door packed with layers of frozen petri dishes provide a temporary refuge for him to gather his wits and come up with a plan.

Suddenly the onslaught stops, and counting quickly in his head, he realizes it's because his opponent only has 3 rounds left in her gun. Peeking out from behind his hiding place, he can see between the gaps of her boots his trifle lying too many feet away to be of any immediate help. The obelisquen is starting to feel really useful as his options wind down.

From the corner of his eyes, he spots a bag of white grainy material on the floor.

 _Agarose (Protein Electrophoresis Grade), Crystalline Powder –_ the bag reads. There is a substantial amount, at least a kilo worth of the stuff. Guess even SHIELD buys in bulk.

 _And thank god for that,_ thinks Ward.

Drawing out the obelisquen from its special pocket, he takes a deep breath, gauging his throw based on the sound of her footfalls, and tosses the open package through the air. The agarose will impair visuals for both of them, but it hardly matters on his end. The obelisquen doesn't have to hit any place in particular; it just has to hit. As the disk leaves his hand, he briefly wonders if it will hurt, dying from something like this. The test subjects did scream, but Ward always got the impression it was more out of sheer terror from seeing yourself turn into dust and being powerless to stop it than anything else.

What a shame, part of his subconscious muses. She is so young.

He sits there, leaning against the cold petri-dishes, and listens to her strangled cry. There is a muffled  _thump_ as her body collapse, and her gun clatters loudly against the linoleum floor. Even as the back of his mind is telling him that something is not right, he is already on the move, wading through the translucent fog towards her remains. Drawing closer, he discover in astonishment that what should've been a pile of ashes is still very much human.

Dear god, she is alive – defiantly, stubbornly,  _impossibly_ alive – and Ward doesn't know what to make of that. In this line of work, there are always surprises; no operation every pans out like the initial plan, and he is the best of the best of them when it comes to adapting to the field. Except, he doesn't expect this,  _her,_ the impossible, and he is struck dumb for the first time since Garrett fished him out of juvie and then left him abandoned in the middle of nowhere.

The girl lies in the debris and wreckage of their fight, writhing desperately as he approaches. Her right cheek is torn open and she's gargling a mouthful of blood, barely managing to sort through short panting breaths.

There is no good reason for which Ward decides to spare her life, other than perhaps to see her again. In another fight. Another place. Another miracle. He wants to unravel her, to unravel  _this,_ whatever it is, whatever  _she_  is, and he is willing to wait. To lurk is to know patience well, and if indeed it is a virtue, then it is one of the only ones he has.

Had he known that in doing so, he is about to embark on the path to the end, he may have turned around, picked up the gun, and emptied it into her. Oh, but he had no idea, so he walks, stepping over her body and doesn't look back.

All around, particles of agarose, beautifully luminescent under the flickering white light, snows down like the beginning of a long nuclear winter.

 

* * *

 

  **16 MONTHS AGO**

 _AUGUST 28, 2014_  
_13:15 EST_  
_PLACE DES ARTS, MONTREAL_

"He was on the list too, you know. Agent Fitz. My list."

"Yeah, I know. Simmons told me." Skye wants to ask after Donnie, how he is, where they had sent him, if he is still alive… if he is still Donnie. But she holds her tongue and says nothing.

Regardless, Ward is astute enough to read into her silence. "Donnie's alright."

It might've been a lie (in fact it probably is), because in actuality he hasn't seen Gills since he handed him over to his superiors after the abduction, and so can't possibly know how the boy is faring.

If Skye finds his reassurance suspicious, she makes no indication of it.

Gingerly, she touches her face, her mind drifting into that terrible memory again. She remembers freezing on the spot as the cloud of irritant flew towards her, and through the white haze, she had heard a faint swoosh, indicative of a spinning projectile, before pain had bloomed across her face.

SHIELD had done their best work on her, but her right cheek scarred. Permanently. Not exactly a physical trait advantageous for field jobs, especially since she'd been promoted to Level 5 and deemed suitable for undercover operations.

 _No matter_ , Jemma had assured her firmly,  _there is nothing a layer of biomimetic film and some makeup can't solve._

Simmons is overcompensating, for obvious reasons. SHIELD had tried to work their magic on Leo too, and well…

"Fitz has Simmons. So he'll be alright too," Skye responds eventually, and when she does, she realizes that despite her efforts, she still revealed far too much.

"What about you?" His question catches her off guard. Like in the many ways she befuddles him, Grant Ward also represents the various ambiguities Skye fails to understand about the world she inhabits.

"What do you mean?"

Other than Garrett, Ward hardly knows what it's to have people give a damn about him the way Skye does for her friends, and so he cannot imagine what it'll be like to lose someone in that way. Before Skye, he had never really cared. Now, he is curious.

"I mean," Ward clarifies. "Will _you_  be alright?"

They are her friends, Fitz and Simmons, and the kind of bond they share is not something encouraged or can even be nurtured amongst the ranks in Hydra. For Ward, loyalties are not professed to your teammates but to the "common cause" they stand for. So it's not difficult to imagine why faiths waver eventually, when the item of your devotion never speak back.

"Oh. I…no," Skye replies, without malice. She pauses prematurely, as if surprised by her own answer. "Considering I'm having coffee with you, I'd say I am so far from alright."

It's the last thing she says to him before they each head off to fight their targets, and her words burn him in some place he can only feel late at night when he is left alone with his thoughts.

After that day, Ward makes a habit of inquiring after Donnie Gills, though he never tells Skye anything about it. It finally becomes clear to him, as it had occurred to her that afternoon in Montreal, just how far from the reservation he has gone, and how far he too is from being alright.

 

 


	3. Backwards Turning

“One pain is lessened by another’s anguish.  
Turn giddy, and be helped by backward turning.  
One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.  
Take thou some new infection to thy eye,   
And the rank poison of the old will die.  
-       _Benvolio | Act I Scene II, Romeo & Juliet_

 

**PRESENT**

 

 _December 25th, 2015_  
_02:06 UTC_  
_The Simmons Residence_  
_23 Orchard Gardens, Effingham, England_

_“We’re losing her! Push 100cc epi. Beginning CPR.”_

_“Stand aside, Agent Simmons, you’re compromised.”_

_“Please. Please, she’s my friend.”_

_…_

Jemma jolted awake. It was late. 

In the dark, she could see through the thin curtains of her childhood bedroom the blur of red, yellow, and green Christmas lights lining the window. Laying a clammy palm against her neck, Jemma sat up and rolled her shoulders, cringing when the joints cracked.    

The entire house smelled deliciously of her mother’s baking, of cinnamon and chocolate, and of everything that would’ve once made her smile. Now, it just made her feel ill.

This was home, but the Jemma Simmons that left its halls naive and hopeful, chasing the calling of science and all the wonders SHEILD Academy promised, had long grown out of her ponytail.

Her parents’ house was so different than her one-bedroom apartment in D.C. That shoe-box sized place belonged to a xenobiochemist, someone who did things on a daily basis that if she described to a passerby, it would sound like something straight from Alien vs Predator. Here, in the UK, she was a just Jemma. Jemma the geeky English girl who grew up with pink braces, didn’t learn how to ride a bike until middle school, possessed an equal love for Conan Doyle and Stephen King, and kept a practical pet turtle named Crick. 

That Jemma had seen the world only for its potentials. That Jemma could have never imagined the horror behind the wonders. 

People said the world changed the day the sky opened up above Manhattan and out poured the creatures that once belonged only in their imaginations. The Alien Conspiracy was no longer a conspiracy but a fact, and the nutters on the internet turned out to be more correct than anyone could’ve expected.

The thing is, the world changed long before New York. It changed the day that Jane Foster ran over an Asgardian with her Jeep in New Mexico. It changed when the Nazis found the Tesseract. 

At least that’s what they said, those in “the-know’.

In the olden days, they thought the planet was flat when in fact it was round. Just two years ago, they had believed that the human race was a singular and unique product in the vast universe, but since then they have been violently informed that not only are they not alone, but that they are also ghastly inferior than both their friends and their foes.  

Staring at the snow and at the row of origami trinkets on her window sill, Jemma thought that they were all wrong. The world had always been more than what the human mind could comprehend.

The world didn’t change.

It was the people who did.

Skye had been a firm believer in the philosophy that the individual mattered more than the collective.  SHIELD preached to them that a team was more than a sum of its parts, but Skye had always argued for the opposite: one man is more than just a fraction of a whole. Every person is by themselves the whole, the entirety, the complete story. For Skye, every life mattered equally. Every life was worth saving. 

Jemma always thought her friend an idealist, but not necessarily naive. Skye was simply....good, in a manner rarely found in this generation. It was not that all was good and agreeable in her eyes. Skye wasn’t blind; she saw the world and all its ugliness in crystal clarity, but she didn’t mind what she saw. She had a way of…accepting it and finding beauty where others could only see wretchedness.

Grant Ward was a perfect example of said wretchedness. Jemma shuddered just at the thought of him. Hydra Agent. Killer.

_“I found something deep in SHIELD database. It’s called GH 325. I need to find it.”_

Skye had approached her one afternoon several months ago. They were on their day off, having a quiet girl’s night at Jemma’s place. When Skye showed Jemma the Level 10 “For Eyes Only” files, Jemma could smell evil HYDRA shenanigan all over it.

Ward had put her up to this. There had been doubt. Jemma always had known he was up to no good: he wanted something from SHIELD and now he had finally found a way to get it. At last, his true intentions were revealed.

_“Have you completely lost your mind?_

_“Jemma, it’s not –_

_“No. This is_ exactly _what I think it is! Skye, you’re playing with fire. You’re going to get yourself killed. This is treason!”_

Those large brown eyes had stared into hers unblinkingly, the resolve in them unbroken. For months and months Jemma had hoped that this would pass - this fascination Skye had for danger, for the forbidden - but then it became clear to her that whatever lies Grant Ward whispered into the ears of her friend, it had taken root somewhere deep inside.

_“I can’t help you. My loyalties have not changed. You’re on your own, Skye.”_

BEEP.

Jemma reached for her SHIELD issued cellphone.

         

                CALLER:  
                Fitz, L.  
                Scotland.

 

“Hey Fitz.”

“Hey, I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No. I was already awake.” She drifted to the window. Outside, the snow had stopped. “It doesn’t feel like Christmas, does it?”

Fitz didn’t speak, and in the absence of his voice, Jemma could hear the buzz of the heater and the chatter echoing from downstairs. Her family was still up. It had been a long-time Simmons' tradition to stay past three on Christmas day and sleep past noon. Jemma never believed in Santa for that reason. How was Santa supposed to sneak in and out inconspicuously with a crowd of eggnog-drunk adults laughing in the living room?

“I’m headed back to D.C tomorrow. I think ah – I’ve had quite enough of Christmas cheer.” Fitz said after a while.

“How did they take it?” Jemma asked carefully, turning back to her bed and sat there in the dark.

“My brother was cool with it. He quite liked the mechanics for my legs. Mum was a bit...weepy.” She could hear him sigh, and there was the distinctive sound of zippers sliding together.

 _Packing at 2 in the morning._ It seemed like she wasn’t the only one who found civilian life…unsettling.

“Did you have a chance to look at, you know…”

Jemma reached into her duffle bag and pulled up Skye’s charts on her tablet. “I’m looking at it right now. I have to do something, Fitz. I can’t let her die.”

“You’re still thinking about it?”  

Jemma responded immediately. She was so tired of holding it in, driving herself up the wall thinking it over day and night. “Aren’t you?! If this works -”

“Simmons –“

“Fitz, they were all lying about Director Coulson! He died in the Hellicarrier _before_ the Invasion of New York. He died! And then minutes after being injected with this….serum….his tissues showed signs of cellular regeneration! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

 “You’re going to go through with this no matter what I say, aren’t you?” Fitz sighed again. He did it a lot lately, even before Skye…

“I am, Fitz. I would never forgive myself if I didn’t try.” Simmons laid back down. The glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling made her irrationally angry. If only the universe was so simple!

“You’ll need help.”

Jemma refused, “No. I can’t drag you through the mud with me.”

“Well, like it or not, I’m already in the mud. We’ve already technically committed treason together for keeping the secret about Ward. Besides, I doubt the two of us will be enough to pull off something like this. We’ll need help from Operations.”

Fitz was right, of course. They were two Level Five sci-tech agents. No field experience. No connections. No authorities. They were tactically useless.

After a moment of consideration, Jemma relented. “Who do you have in mind?”

Fitz said nothing, which was more than enough for Jemma.

“You’re thinking of Tripp.”

Fitz didn’t want to ask, because Antoine Triplett was Jemma’s….well something. It was complicated. Tripp was Skye’s old friend – probably from Operations, though Skye never specified. It was through her that Jemma came to know the charming, easy-going field agent, and as far as Fitz knew it was instant sparks. 

He _was_ jealous. At least he was real with himself enough to admit it, but it didn’t matter. Once, he had born the hope that Jemma would see him the way that he saw her, but if all these years at the Academy plus working together at the Triskelion couldn’t turn her interest towards him then…

Anyway, it was already too dangerous with the two of them working this op, but to drag in Tripp as well, someone who Jemma clearly cared very much about, would be putting too much at stake.

But, if one were counting stakes, didn’t Skye’s life weigh heavier than the threat of suspension?

“He would want to help us,” Fitz stated. “We need him.”  

Jemma knew Fitz was right. They did need Tripp, a close friend, someone they could count on to see it through till the end. There was no better candidate. Jemma never understood why it was that Fitz didn’t get along with Tripp – the man was so likeable! – but she never pried. Fitz was courteous and nice, but Jemma could tell he was more prickly than usual when Tripp was around. 

And if even Fitz was willing to put personal differences aside for Skye, well, Jemma would not be much of a friend if she didn’t at least sum up the courage to ask. If Tripp ended up suspended or worse… well that was on her, for bringing him into this mess. Still, a part of her figured that if Tripp found out one day that she had a shot of saving Skye’s life and didn’t take it, he would not forgive her for it.

Once they got back to D.C, Jemma decided, she was going to make that phone call.

“We’ll need someone from Admin, someone to cover our tracks, make the arrangements.”

Fitz smiled on the other end. They needed Tripp. Bad. Thank god, Jemma agreed.  

But Admin…

He hesitated. He wasn’t exactly sure if his hunch was correct. The other night, when he was locking up the lab, he thought he saw someone snooping around his desk area. An Asian woman who said she was just there to give him some generic notification for next month’s lab safety inspection. But, after she left, Fitz could no longer find the chip that Director gave him.

By the time he had realized it was gone, it was too late. He’d already boarded the flight back to Scotland for Christmas. He should've reported it right away, but... 

“I think I got someone.”

“Who?”

“Agent Melinda May.”

 

* * *

 

  **18 MONTHS AGO**

 _June 5th, 2014_  
_10:23 AM_  
_Skye's Apartment_  
_ 7730 Eastern Ave NW, Washington D.C, 20012_

“I’m fucked.”

Skye exclaimed, staring at her reflection in the mirror. After multiple operations, her bandages and stitches were finally removed, and well… she wasn’t taking the results too well.  

“I’m _completely_ ruined.”

Jemma sighed from where she was lounging on Skye’s couch, her tablet open before her as she read through the procedure for Fitz’s prosthetic fitting.

“You’re not ruined,” Jemma corrected her friend for the umpteenth time. She felt like a broken record, repeating the same things over and over again.

“Jemma’s right,” agreed Tripp as he emerged from the kitchen, carrying a large ceramic mug shaped like a cat. “Girl, you’re still hot as hell. Even with the scar – especially with the scar.”

“Goddamn it Trip,” Skye groaned. It was way too early to be quoting Margaery Tyrell, and Tripp was definitely too much of a geek for his own good. “This isn’t Game of Thrones, and I’m _not_ Tyrion Lannister.”  

In hindsight, Skye’s scar was hardly an issue. In a couple of months’ time, Dr. Helen Cho would have made her breakthrough with nanotechnology in tissue regeneration, saving the body and beauty of thousands of scarred individuals.

But currently, Skye’s biggest worry wasn’t about her looks.

“Jemma, I’m finished in the field! Done for. I’ll have to transfer to admin.” There was a look of abject horror on her face, and Jemma sighed again, louder, before sitting up.

“Skye –“

“I mean look at my face. Spies don’t have distinguishing features, that’s the trade standard 101.  I look like someone had tried to recreate the Joker but missed the mark. It’s ghastly!”

Tripp snickered, though not mean-spiritedly. Really the scar wasn’t all that bad. Yes it was red, but that was only because the stitches were fresh, and yes it was long, but fortunately it blended well with the contour of her face. Trip hadn’t been completely joking when he said she was a looker _especially_ with the scar.

Jemma pulled Skye down so she sat on the couch beside her, and said earnestly, “If that’s your concern, you shouldn’t be. There’s nothing a bit of makeup and the biomimetic film won’t solve.”

Skye calmed a bit at her friend’s encouragements, and when she glanced down at the tablet in Jemma’s lap her thoughts drifted to Fitz, who was still bedridden, and she grimaced in guilt. “Yeah, I suppose things could’ve been a lot worse.”

The “Battle of Triskelion” or “Triskelion Invasion” was a complete and utter gong-show, but it was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. In those short adrenaline filled hours, facing their enemies, their spirits were high, and their will to resist and rise up to the oaths they’ve taken as agents of SHIELD had never been stronger.

Foiling Hydra’s plan and kicking them back into the dark holes they’ve crawled out from - that had been such a high, such a win, that it made them momentarily forget about what would come next. The aftermath was where the real struggle had been.

The body count, the seemingly endless injured and dead being transported away to emergency services, watching their building – the Triskelion, the heart of SHIELD – collapse into rumbles, that would’ve been a chilling moment for all of them if they had not been all too busy trying to stay alive or help others stay alive. In the days afterwards, returning to the spot where their agency once stood, was… there were no words to describe it.

One agent, a native New Yorker, called it SHIELD ground zero, and in a way, he wasn’t wrong.

However, since SHIELD was not extinguished by Hydra’s attempt, life went on very quickly. For those who were not critically injured, they had to pick themselves up, dust themselves off to prepare for what was to come.

Within hours of The Triskelion’s collapse, the major powers of the organization had regrouped at an alternate location, a secret base known as The Playground. Following protocols, a new chain of command was established and agreed upon by all major SHIELD heads across the globe. World leaders and the UN were notified, as were the prominent spy agencies.

The first order issued to all agents was that in wake of Nick Fury’s death, Philip Coulson, previously thought to have been deceased, would be instated as the new Director of SHIELD. Second, all personnel were to report to their commanding officer and nearest SHIELD post ASAP pending an internal investigation. Hydra had bought out Alexander Pierce and the Strike Team… who knew how many more had fallen to the other side.

It was for this reason that Jemma had not been there when the doctors at the George Washington Trauma Centre amputated Fitz.

In the report, it said that they took his left leg first.

Everything mid femur down was removed. With SHIELD’s main medical facility down, casualties were dividedly treated between the top trauma centers of the tristate area. The surgical team took one look at what was left of Fitz’s mangled limb and shook their head. The damage had been too extensive, the explosion in the lab took too much of everything for medicine to redeem.

24 hours post amputation, before he’d even waken, Fitz developed an infection that burned through his right tibia and part of his right ulna. The doctors had wanted to consult Fitz’s family in Scotland, but the name listed under his emergency contact was Jemma. “Partner” – it just said. Time was of the essence, so of course they made contact with Jemma in the first given opportunity. Fortunately, the pencil pusher had given her the green light, and Jemma was flown back to DC from the Playground. (She didn’t know this, but Skye had been placed at the same hospital as Fitz, and when she’d learned of the second round of amputation, she called her dad, and for the first and only time, used her privilege as daughter to persuade him to tell admin to cut her friend some slacks.)

Jemma had followed the hospital gurney all the way ‘til the end, her hand gripping Fitz’s, until the nurse blocked her at the entrance and the OR doors shut in her face.

 _Not the arm,_ she had yelled after them repeatedly. _Not his arm! Take the leg, but for god sake, save the arm!_

They saved the arm, but the leg was lost even before the operation started. The cut below the right knee, like the one done on the left femur, was clean, and the orthopedic surgeon explained that prosthetics should not be an issue. Jemma tried and failed to block out mental images of The Winter Soldier (oh yes, she’d seen the photos, everyone in SHIELD had by then) and shuddered.

For nine straight days, Fitz was under a medically induced coma, and those were perhaps the longest nine days of her life.

In her memory, there had been pain and hellfire and smoke that permeated every inch of the lab. There was that man – that Hydra agent – who slung Donnie over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Then there had been Skye, covered in blood. Jemma had remembered running down flights after flights of stairs, seeming to go on forever. The low moaning of the building, compromised by the explosions and the heat, echoed in her ear as though she were in the belly of a great beast. 

Finally, air at last, the sweet, sweet freedom. Gasping and wheezing, Jemma had been swept away by a force she couldn’t identify, her grip on Fitz’s sleeve forcefully severed by a strong pair of hands – a firefighter? She hadn’t been able to tell. A mask had been placed over her face – oh the sirens were loud, growing softer – and the last thing she recalled before the darkness claimed her was the sky, littered with countless helicopters and jets, still the bluest thing she’d ever seen

Against hospital regulation, Jemma bunked in Skye’s hospital room, refusing to leave. The injury to Fitz’s head resulting from the Triskelion attack had left him with high risks of swelling and permanent damage. If that was the case, Jemma wanted to make she sure was there when he woke up to discover that his entire world had disappeared with the Triskelion.

 _Dr. Fitz is a great gift to the scientific community – it would be a shame to lose him. The induced coma will reduce energy expenditure of the brain and give him the best chance at a full recovery,_ the head of neurology explained. _The nerve damage in his right arm is very extensive too, but we’re hopeful. We’ve seen physio do wonders._

Jemma understood the facts, being a MD herself, but still it wasn’t easy, sitting there watching him lying tcompletely unaware that parts of himself were already taken from him. A part of her – the part that thought ahead and was an obsessively compulsive planner – was already mulling over the possibility of booking a therapist for Fitz.

_Whatever he needs. Whatever he needs, I’ll be there for him. He won’t be in this alone._

On the fifth night, Jemma woke up to find Skye's room empty. She found her friend sitting alone in the hospital cafeteria, barefoot, with an IV attached to her arm, and wearing nothing except a hospital robe and a dressing gown from home. For half a second, Jemma wondered who amidst this madness had time to go to Skye’s apartment to get her things…

(Jemma also didn’t know this, but Melinda had dropped by the hospital, bringing Skye some of her comfort objects – her dressing gown, her laptop, her elephant slippers – and Nana May’s cooking.)

When Jemma found Skye, the agent was running a low grade fever. She couldn’t speak clearly because the injuries made it difficult for her inflamed facial muscle. Skye had tried to make light of the situation, but Jemma couldn’t smile. Another person would thank the gods for such good luck compared to her colleagues, emerging unscathed after a terrorist attack and being held at gun point, but Jemma could only feel the guilt that ate away at her conscience.

Survivor’s guilt. She’s only ever read it in textbooks. Operatives were taught going into the field to expect bodies to drop left and right; they were taught to hang onto friends but not too tightly, that no one was immortal. Sci-tech were trained to recite the periodic table before breakfast, but not for this. They are silicon, they are not steel: they were not forged under fire. _Fitz_ was not forged under the fire. Neither was Jemma. 

They were both in that lab, how could she have escaped with barely a scratch and her best friend…

Silence filled the cafeteria as Jemma sat with Skye, one arm around the younger woman as the two fell asleep leaning against each other. The quietness was unsettling. It felt as if standing on the roof of your house after a flood.  You stand there, staring haplessly and helplessly at the destruction, your neighbour across the street mirroring your action, and so is the guy next door. No one makes a sound, but it doesn’t mean that everyone has stopped screaming.

“He could’ve killed me, but he didn’t….” Skye had said, half asleep. Jemma hadn’t understood then but in time, she will.

Fitz was, as it turned out, the strongest of all of them.  It took some time for him to come to terms with the loss of his legs, but while Jemma and Skye had expected months and months, Fitz only required three days. Oh, but it was three days of absolute hell. It still made them ill thinking about it.

On the fourth morning, Fitz greeted them with a sloppy sketch of his own designs. His right arm was still pretty banged up, he could only grip the pencil between his thumb and caste, but still, that was enough for him to make out a doodle of his future legs. Gazing at his drawing, Jemma and Skye had exchanged incredulous looks, not believing that their dear Fitz could make such a drastic change in attitude overnight. The design was well thought out; it must’ve have taken him ages – the whole night, as it turned out. Fitz hadn’t slept, much to the medical team’s dismay.

“I’ve decided that I’m going to get the sickest prosthetic,” Fitz said. “The Winter Soldier will have nothing on me.” 

“Fitz…there is no rush. You really shouldn’t push yourself so hard - ”

“But I needed to know!” Fitz insisted, voice a little louder this time. He gazed up at Jemma, and god, his eyes were burning. Without words, Jemma understood and her hand curled around his gently.

“I needed to know…” Fitz reiterated in a softer tone. “That I could still _work_ , that I was still… _me.”_

Skye had nodded tearfully, her own injuries temporarily forgotten. “You’ll be a superhero, an Avenger.”

Fitz, in his perfectly schooled American accent, responded, “Damn straight.”

They all cried, but it was the release they’ve been waiting for. 

It’s been a month, and it hadn’t been easy.

“Hey, hey, none of this sulky faces.” Triplet snapped his fingers in front of their eyes, bringing Jemma and Skye out of their reveries. “We promised. Nothing but positive energy for Fitz’s big day.” 

“You’re right.” Jemma said. “Well, we should go now. Don’t want to be late.”

Suddenly, Skye’s phone beeped. “Oh, hold on.”

_We have to talk. I have more informations. – GW_

“What is it, girl?” asked Tripp, slipping into his snickers.

Skye stared at her phone screen, and wondered (not for the last time) if she was seriously losing her mind.

His was the first face she saw when she woke up in the ICU – that Hydra agent who had taken her down with a flying disk. He was sitting there in a _SHIELD_ uniform of all things, flipping through a magazine.

_“How did you find me?”_

_“It wasn’t hard.”_

Grant Ward. He said his name was. She didn’t even know if that was his real name. Probably not.

She had tried to call for the nurse, but he placed his hand over the call button and shook his head, exasperated. “ _Please don’t. This won’t take long, and if you call the nurse, I’ll have to kill you.”_

_“As if you weren’t planning on it already?”_

_“No, in fact, I wasn’t.  I just want to talk, and to show you something.”_

From his pocket, he had withdrawn a small black box, and when he flicked it open in a fashion that man would present an engagement ring to his lover, a small round disk was present inside.

The same type of weapon he used on her not a week ago.

_“It’s called the obelisquen – Hydra’s newest gadget.”_

_“Why are you telling me this?”_

_“Because,” Ward explained, holding his phone screen closer to her face so she could see exactly how the test subject in the video crumpled to dust after being struck with the weapon. The sight made her sick and angry._

_“This is –“_

_“Infallible. Or it was. No one has ever survived the obelisquen. No one...until you.”_

_Skye had been labelled as a lot of things in her life. Genius level IQ. Rebellious. Hacker. Delinquent. Drop-out. And now apparently Harry frigging Potter of SHIELD to the Voldemort of Hydra. Great. Just bloody fantastic._

_“What does Hydra want?”_

_“Hydra? I wear the uniform and that’s it. I don’t give a damn what Hydra wants.”_

_“Okay, so what do you want?”_

_“I want to know why. Why you lived. Don’t you?”_

Curiosity killed the cat, but damn it, Skye was really hoping satisfaction would bring it back.

“Skye?”

“Yeah!” She snapped up from her thoughts.

“You okay? Who is it?”

“Oh, nothing. Come on, let’s go.” 


	4. Mad Men

"Not mad, but bound more than a madman is,    
Shut up in prison, kept without my food,   
Whipped and tormented."   
_-_ _Romeo_ | _Act 1 Scene II_  

 

 

 **19 M** **ONTHS AGO**  

        _APRIL 15_ _, 2014_    
_23_ _:_ _46_ _EST_    
_ICU ROOM 23_    
_GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL - TRAUMA CENTER_    
_900 23_ _RD_ _ST_ _._ _N_ _W,_ _Washington, DC 20037_  

 

The ICU in the trauma ward was a sterile, quiet place, unlike the ER, which made no differentiation between day or night. There, things were always busy, always hectic, a cog in the machine in constant motion.  

But the ICU...it was the calm before the storm, it was the breath you hold before pulling the trigger, the last thought running through your mind before jumping.  

Anything and everything could change at a second's notice. There was no constancy, no predictability. A patient could crash, be resuscitated and live, or they could die. Wires unplugged. Sheets drawn up. Time called.   

It was in such a place that Grant Ward found the impossible girl, the girl who lived.  

 _Agent_ _Skye._ Her chart read. No last name. He would not be much of an agent if that didn't raise a red flag.  

Security wasn't high. No one here was worth assassinating, and therefore worth protecting...at least not when resources were limited and occupied by bigger and more pressing matters of international significance. But in Ward's opinion, if he ran the show at SHIELD, he would've boxed up Skye with lead walls, send her to their best and brightest, and study every cubic nanometer of her. 

Slipping past the nurses was a joke, and in any case, he was in a _SHIELD_ uniform. Before he went in, Ward sneaked a glance at Skye's neighbouring room. The boy was intubated and wrapped in gauze and sling.  

Leopold Fitz. The scientist under the metal racks. The one Jemma Simmons the biochemist had been willing to die to protect. Fitz was the mission he didn't complete, but then again, Ward doubt Hydra would want much to do with a wasted man.  

But Skye on the other hand. 

He didn't have to think very hard to imagine the reward his Hydra superiors would grant him for discovering this gem. Except - Ward had no intentions of reporting Skye. No, his interests in her was purely personal.      

 _The prognosis of a metastasized_ _pancreatic_ _ad_ _enocarcinoma_ _is_ _grim at best. 74% of the patients die within the year, and the average life expectancy was three to six month. John Garrett is a dead man walking. Shame. He was one of HYDRA's finest._  

Just like that, the topic was dismissed by the inner council, and Garrett's life was written off. If Ward ever needed a reminder just how expendable human lives were, this was one slap to the face that left his skin stinging and hot.  

The man who made the announcement was Dr. Whitehall - 110 years of age and looking not a day over forty, so one would have to forgive Ward for thinking that there was more curative powers in this fucked up world than "modern science" claimed.  

The Grant Ward before Garrett was nothing. Pathetic. He was lost, weak, and full of self-loathing. As far as Ward was concerned, Garrett gave him purpose, direction and structure. HYDRA was relentless, and yet somehow in that cold, authoritarian relentlessness, Ward found a strength in himself that he had never been able to before in the abusive environment of his upbringing.  

He owed his everything to Garrett, and while he would take a perverse sort of joy in setting his own father on fire, for Garrett, Ward would be willing to take on any agency. HYDRA. SHIELD. Good. Bad. It made little difference to him. It goes without saying that as Ward walked into that ICU room and stood before Skye's hospital bed, there was not a wisp of hesitation in his conscience about taking her life to save Garrett's.  

Skye and Ward - their story is not one of innocents, and to say that Ward never had an ulterior motive against his lover would be a blatant lie. Yet, whatever his intentions were from the get-go, it would seem that the forces which governed this universe had other plans. 

Ward folded himself into a chair by her bedside and picked up a gossip magazine of no importance. In silence, his mind turned, contemplating. It wasn't a difficult task to sneak Skye out of the hospital, but she was clearly in need of medical care, which if deprived, could potentially endanger her life and thereby the purpose of his mission.  

He fiddled with the magazine page as he watched the slow rise and fall of her chest, fingers tapping against the book spine as he contemplated his options. SHIELD had been too liberal with their public image these past years, and the attack had alerted them to their own security deficits. Post fall of the Triskelion, whispers of major administration upheaval floated along the intelligence grapevine, but details about the shuffling of assets and resources had all gone underground, leaving HYDRA's usual intel sources grasping at straws.  

Ward frowned. If he didn't act straight away, who knows where this girl would end up when the tidal waves calmed. And it's not as if he was all that free to do as he wished and monitored her indefinitely. He still had to maintain some front of obedience to Hydra, and so must continue playing along with the orders he was given.   

 _Can't leave her, can't bring her_ _along_ _..._   Ward sighed, frustrated.  

Without warning, Skye began to stir, grimacing as she grew increasingly aware of the pains and aches wrecking her battle-weary body. Ward watched her struggle to lift her head, lethargically blinking as she adjusted to her compromised state.  

Suddenly, an idea sparked in his head.  

"I must say, you have seen better days."  

The girl did not respond, but instead reached for the call bell.  

His fist closed around her own before she could push the button.  

For a moment, Skye didn't move, still stubbornly trying to resist him despite barely able to lift her arm. It was almost admirable, her tenacity, and Ward was amused once again. Intrigued too.  

"Please don't," he said. "Or I'll have to kill you." 

"As if you weren't planning to already." Her words were slurred and muffled, probably from the shit ton of codeine pumped into her system, but the giant gauze patched on her injured cheek definitely didn't help either.  

"Planning to? Maybe. But not today." Ward gave her a crooked smirk, pressing her hand back down onto the bed, the call bell still firmly grasped in her fist. She was in no position to fight him, and they both knew it. Perhaps Skye had decided that it was in her best interest to play along, because slowly, she relented, shouldering sagging either with resignation or exhaustion, he couldn't tell. But by then, the residual lethargy from her sleep had all but faded into nothing, and when her vision finally zeroed in on his shadowy figure, Ward was startled to find that the recognition in them was sharp as glass. 

 _Yours is a face I could never forget,_ Skye would eventually tell him one day, and he would not be vain or proud enough to interpret this as her communicating her affection for him. Rather, he would understand it for what it was. His face was the last she saw during what she had believed to be her last few seconds on Earth. His was the face of her killer, her murderer - whether he succeeded or not was beside the point. She would always remember him for what he was, no matter how many times they tumbled into treason together, how many times she claimed him or given herself to him. She could forgive, but she would never forget.  

But the Grant Ward that sat in her hospital room that very first night after The Triskelion Incident did not know any of things that were about to happen.  

"How do you feel?" He inquired. His interest, while genuine, stemmed purely from an analytical perspective. She was the sole survivor of the obelisquen (as far as he knew), and therefore a wealth of data.  

"How do you think?" She snapped, teeth barring in a scowl despite her injuries. "Like an evil Nazi tried to tear my face off with a ninja star of death."  

"Could be worse." 

Skye's grip on her call bell tightened, "Why are you here? What do you want?"  

"I just wanted to talk, and to show you something." 

That day, Ward made a bet against himself on the quality of her character. He didn't know her, had nothing upon which to judge her, but he felt deeply in his bones that if he showed her Hydra's secrets, if he gave her a glimpse of the obelisquen's true potential, then she would follow this trail until the end of the line... until she discovered what it was that made her different - _special_ _._ What had made her live when all the others had died. And then, only then, would he kill her, and in doing so take from her whatever he needed to save Garrett's life.   

He knew it was possible, that there were people...creatures....which walked this earth amongst the humans and which possessed powers to overcome death. He'd seen Whitehall do it, seen him butcher a woman for her organs, and witnessed how those organs had shed decades from his body.  

With this thought in mind, Ward placed his phone in Skye's hand and played the secret footage he had taken of Hydra's experiments. The video's eerie blue glow, providing the only source of light in the darkness, lid up the shadows on her face and the fear in her eyes.  

For a second, Ward worried that he might have overestimated her, that she would be frightened witless by what she saw and run back seeking SHIELD's protection. Yet, when the video ended and all that was left of test subject's screams were the echoes in the viewer's subconscious, it was not fear which wallowed in the depth of Skye's widened gaze, but something far more dangerous.  

Curiosity.  

Thus Ward knew, that he had won. He could confidently walk out of the hospital today without the worry of losing track of Skye, because she would come for him and seek him out, if only so he could lead her to the truth. 

The Devil does not steal souls. He doesn't have to. Those who sin have always been willing.   

But Ward was wrong too, in assuming that this deal would be so simple. He had believed, foolishly, that she was the only one being led into temptation, but that wasn't true. There was a heavy price placed on both them, a price that he will discover in time could only be paid in blood.  

 

 

 

 

 **P** **RESENT**  

          _DECEMBER 25, 2015_    
_05_ _:02 LOCAL TIME_    
_SHIELD BASE: THE CUBE_    
_LOCATION: CLASSIFIED_  

 

He is going to die, that much he is sure.  

Philip Coulson and Melinda May would love to see him torn to bits, but he doubts even that can offer them any relief for the anguish that burns in their chests.  

He is the murderer who led their daughter astray, the reason she is...incurable, brain-dead, gone. 

And at this point, he will admit that he deserves it.  

SHIELD has no protocol for executions - each offending criminal is sent back to the origin of their primary nationality. If he were Canadian, what awaits him would be solitary confinement for the rest of his life, with no chance for parole. Not that he wants parole. After all, what is left out there for him?  

But Grant Douglas Ward is by birth a citizen of the United States. He knows exactly what is going to happen. First, the agencies will come: NSA, CIA, FBI, Pentagon. They're all going to try and make deals with him. He is a world of information. A top level Hydra agent. For the government men, he is worth a whole lot more than the justice his death would mean for his victims.  

Killers like him were not in want of employment or people who would vouch for him.  

 _Thank you, but I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds._  

Vaguely, Ward recalls those words from a movie he and Skye watched together. They were in her apartment in D.C, because she was feeling bold and reckless, and had grown tired of hotels and beds that were not her own. 

Ward closes his eyes, remembering the warmth of her skin when he laid between her hips, his kisses marking a line down her belly, until his tongue found her where she was wet and wanting and drew from her lovely breathy moans.  

She had laid on pale grey sheets, her hair wild and free, and he could've sworn that she was glowing.  

 _"Oh god...Grant"_ Skye sighed, back arching, one hand twisting the bedding into knots as the other tightened her grip on his hair.  

He never understood how she could make his name sound like a prayer instead of a sin, or how she would choose to cling to him, and allow him to taint her in ways that had nothing to do with carnal urges...   

And afterwards, they had put on Netflix, as if they were just another young couple in America, lounging in bed and basking in the afternoon sun. He made them each a club sandwich, while Skye threw on her Star Wars t-shirt and cracked open two beers. Ward had never been so happy as he had been then, with Skye snuggled next to him, V for Vendetta playing in the background while they drank, talked and kissed languidly in her bed.  

If Skye had asked him then and there, asked him to give up his mission, give up Hydra, he would've done it in a heartbeat. 

Except, they were both kidding themselves, because half way through the movie, Skye got a call from her superiors, and he watched her become someone else in front of the mirror. Her suits zipped up, her guns loaded, and her hairs tied back tighter than a noose.   

 _Just give them_ _something... anything._ The evil faceless man had said in the movie.  

 _Thank you, but I'd rather die behind the chemical sheds._ Natalie Portman's mile-long stare belied her character's state of mind.  

 _"Okay, that's quite enough of that."_ Skye had said to the t.v. as she clicked it shut. _"I have to go,"_ She turned to him, who was still nude under the sheets. She looked like she had wanted to say something more; hesitance hovered in her brown eyes. If she were another agent, she would've warned him against snooping through her stuff, in case he got any ideas about digging for SHIELD secrets, but instead she merely leaned down and kissed him. Her kiss was a little too soft, too tender, and the hand touching his cheek trembled inconceivably.  

Without another word, she was gone, and he left too, about an hour later. Her apartment remained untouched. 

Ward turns in his cell bunk, facing the grey cement walls. He resists the urge to curl up, even though the memory makes him ill to the core.  

_Suppose, I stopped being SHIELD, and you stopped being Hydra...we could do anything we want. People like us never have trouble finding a job._

_It's_ _a just a thought_ , she dismissed it with a cavalier shrug, _just a fanciful dream._ He had smiled indulgently down at her and told her that it was perfect, evening though he knew he could never escape his shackles.  

Now it seems, he is not the only one. Skye....or whoever she is...she has her own set of chains too, binding her with words like family, duty, and "doing the right thing".  

They are all dogs in their own ways; they merely serve different masters.  

Ward doesn't want to be anyone's dog, not anymore.  

 _"I'm not going to work for the CIA, or NSA or whoever_ _. I don't want to cooperate, and I'm not going to talk. You know who I am, you know what I did....what I had done...to Skye. I don't think there's anything we can offer each other."_  

Those are the words he said to Coulson and May before he turned his back to them. He couldn't bare to look at them, because he saw only Skye in their faces, and it was too much.   

 _"T_ _he United States wants to_ _give you the needle."_  

 _"Then so be it."_ It will be a mercy.  

For the first time in his life, he is finally free. All his life, there had been so much anger, anger that drove him into junvi, anger that drove him into becoming an assassin for HYDRA. Now, there is no anger, that singular entity which kept him grounded, living, running, fighting, is gone, and he is ready to face judgment.   

Though, he can already imagine the verdict.  

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.  

Oddly enough, he feels glad, like there is safety in the certainty of his fate.  

Ward closes his eyes, trying for some sleep, but all he can think of is Skye.  

 _"Don't worry, we'll save_ _him_ _._ _Garrett._ _"_ He can never understand how she could understand his duty towards Garrett. She felt nothing for the man - in fact he knew she'd be perfectly happy killing John if ever given the opportunity, but for Ward, Skye was willing to bend the rules.  

 _I'll save him from a slow death - for you. But if I see him again, I’m putting a bullet through his brain. Got it?_  

He wants to preserve that moment - the last time he saw her whole, unharmed, determination etched into the dent between her brows. The last words she said to him, her hands cupping his face as they stood under the shade of the hotel foyer in Marrakech.   

Morocco in December is heaven, the average temperature just the right touch of cool, but his whole body had felt warm in the glow of her smile.  

She was disguised as a tourist: a white broad brimmed hat, fashionable shades, and a long maxi dress the colour of sunshine.  

He felt strong basking in her light, determined and unafraid.  

" _I'm close to a breakthrough. Soon, I promise."_  

He should've stopped her then. He wanted to, he really did. SHIELD was already onto them by that point. The consequences were chasing after them and gaining ground, like the ghosts of their decision rising to haunt them.  

 _"Skye, listen_ _\- maybe you shouldn't_ _..._ _"_  

But he was coward till the end. He wanted too much and asked for what he didn't deserve.  

Skye's gaze had become foggy, as if she had retreated within herself, and when she emerged from her deep contemplation, it seemed she hadn't heard what he said, but ploughed onwards with her own train of thought instead.  

"And afterward," Skye had tilted her head, reaching out and touching a button on his shirt _._ "I thought about what you said. I can't go back. And neither can you, so..." 

She had looked up at him expectantly. "There are some things I have to settle with my... people...but -" 

Ward had understood, and a surge of something that had tasted like freedom swelled from the bottom of his body, and he felt as though he could physically lift off the ground against gravity. He cupped the back of her neck with one hand, and pulled her forward until their forehead touched.  

 _"The world has to have a place for us, right?"_ She had whispered against him.  

 _"Yes, yes...yes.."_  

Skye had swallowed his confirmation with a kiss, and Ward saw the light.  

"Ward."  

For a moment, his heart stops beating.  

"Grant Ward."  

The voice sounds so much like Skye's, but it's not hers, and alas, when he opens his eyes, there she is. Melinda May stands tall, alone this time, on the other side of the cell.  

Very briefly, he considers engaging with her, but he doesn't. He's already made his point perfectly clear earlier. He's not interested in talking or negotiating, if they can end his misery by means of a bullet or a needle, that'd be much appreciated thanks.  

Ward grunts and closes his eyes again.  

"GH 325. Project T.A.H.I.T.I."  

Hearing those words feels like a dose of ice water pouring straight into his lungs. Those were the names Skye had told him...secrets she found about SHIELD... 

Ward sits up.  

May smirks.  

"I realized my earlier mistake," says the agent. "I assumed you'd want to talk about my daughter, but then I thought, she isn't what you wanted, is she? Daisy - Skye - she was just a means to an end, and she's useless to you now. So, I’m not here to talk about Skye, I'm here to talk about the real subject of your interest." 

It's not true. His focus had long since deviated from his original plan. But Ward doesn’t correct May, because a sudden realization has dawned on him.  

Slowly, he walks towards the cell barrier. 

"Skye never talked about her family, but I always wondered...and then I saw you and Coulson, and I couldn't decide.... but thank you, Agent May. Thank you."  

"Thank me? For what?"  

Perhaps he is finally going crazy. Insanity - it does happen to prisoners, but Ward doesn't worry about that now, because for the first time in days, he feels a flicker of hope beneath his despair.  

"I can see it in your eyes - you know. Perhaps you've always known. You're one of them." 

Incredibly, the great Cavalry wavers. 

And Ward knows that he is right. He thinks of the strangely scarred woman that lurked in Skye's shadows during that one mission in Kuwait and the cryptic words she said to him, words he did not repeat to Skye... 

"One of whom?" May demands.  

Ward smiles, "The chosen people of the blue angels." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooooo sorry for the long wait. Graduate school is hard.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is inspired and dedicated to asheathes and her gifset.


End file.
